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Mapping Gangs, and an App for Artists

5.23.13

Harvard President Drew Faust greets the winners of the President's Challenge for social entrepreneurship in her office, in advance of the public announcement of their win. Florian Mayr '13 (from left), Matthew Polega '13, Drew Faust, and Scott Crouch '13 are pictured in Massachusetts Hall.

Photograph by Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard News Office

Photograph by Jon Chase/Harvard News Office

During an engineering design seminar at Massachusetts State
Police Headquarters last year, three Harvard students were surprised by how rarely
law enforcement utilizes technology in gang
surveillance. Determined to find a solution, the students—computer science
concentrators Scott Crouch ’13, Florian Mayr ’13, and Matthew Polega ’13—built
a software tool called Nucleik that will
help police tackle gang violence by providing instant access to accurate and
organized data, such as background information on suspects and graphical
displays of criminal networks. The software has such potential to make a difference in police work that it came in
first in the President’s Challenge for Social Entrepreneurship, a contest that encourages students from across the University to find important, high-impact solutions to
the world’s most pressing social problems.

The team—which beat 126 others to win $70,000, the grand prize—has
developed what it calls an information collection environment (ICE) that runs
on smartphones or tablets and can be used by law enforcement officials to
collect information that syncs automatically with information on the phones or
tablets used by other team members. The software, which has been used by the
Springfield (Massachusetts) police department’s gang unit since last summer,
can do things such as match disparate information to identify only those gang
members of a certain age who frequent a particular address. The system can also
display a criminal network graphically, allowing police to identify connections
among gang members and drug dealers.

“Normally you’d need probably five pieces of software to do
all of this and it would take hours. Now with one [program], it takes minutes,”
Crouch told
The Boston Globe in March. “One
of the major problems with law enforcement is that most departments use
distinct and incompatible systems, impeding the ability to share criminal
information. We hope to fix that.”

Three other student-led teams were named runners-up in the President’s
Challenge and awarded $10,000 each:

Team Flume, for building a comprehensive and
up-to-date map of the human genome through a crowdsourced webtool;

Team
PlenOptika, which aims to distribute a device that can quickly test a
person’s vision and then provide the best off-the-shelf prescription; and

Team
TerraTek, which is developing a two-sided platform that allows
individuals to more easily secure property rights in order to obtain credit and
other social benefits, while simultaneously helping governments plan more
effectively and expand their property rights and revenue databases.

Deans’ Cultural
Entrepreneurship Challenge

Frustrated by the lack of funding for arts and design
projects in Boston, a student-led team named MUSEY designed a mobile app that
allows people to support art outside museum walls. Using geotechnology that enables
users to locate art in their immediate vicinity, to learn more about it, and to
support it financially, MUSEY’s app lets cultural organizations collect contact
information and financial donations from their audiences easily.

Comprised of Graduate School of Design students Judy Fulton,
Hokan Wong, and Wes Thomas, as well as undergraduate Lucy Cheng ’16 and Loeb
Fellow Helen Marriage, MUSEY recently won $30,000, the grand prize in the
inaugural Deans’
Cultural Entrepreneurship Challenge, which attracted 70 entries from teams
across 13 Harvard schools. Announced in the fall, the challenge celebrates
artistic and entrepreneurial visions, and grows out of an interdisciplinary
partnership among Harvard Business School, the division of arts and humanities
in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS), and the Silk Road Project (under the
leadership of Yo-Yo Ma ’76, D.Mus. ’91).

“This is a huge vote of confidence and encouragement,”
Fulton said of the award in a press release. “Now we know we can probably work
on it for a full year. It’s amazing.”

Three other student-led teams were awarded $15,000 each as
runners-up in the Challenge:

Midas Touch, which uses 3-D printing to render
paintings in a form accessible to the visually impaired;

Culturally, an online social discovery and
engagement ecosystem for the arts; and

Music+1, a mobile app that provides adaptive
orchestral accompaniment in real time to musicians.